Famous Reviews eBook

Mr. Hunt tells us that Dryden, Spenser and Ariosto,
Shakespeare and Chaucer (so he arranges them), are
the greatest masters of modern versification;
but he, in the next few sentences, leads us to suspect
that he really does not think much more reverently
of these great names than of Pope and of Johnson;
and that, if the whole truth were told, he is decidedly
of opinion that the only good master of versification,
in modern times, is—­Mr. Leigh Hunt.

Dryden, Mr. Hunt thinks, is apt to be artificial
in his style; or, in other words, he has improved
the harmony of our language from the rudeness of Chaucer,
whom Mr. Hunt (in a sentence which is not grammar,
p. xv) says that Dryden (though he spoke of and borrowed
from him) neither relished nor understood. Spenser,
he admits, was musical from pure taste, but Milton
was only, as he elegantly expresses it, “learnedly
so.” Being learned in music, is intelligible,
and, of Milton, true; but what can Mr. Hunt mean by
saying that Milton had “learnedly a musical
ear”? “Ariosto’s fine ear
and animal spirits gave a frank and
exquisite tone to all he said”—­what
does this mean?—­ a fine ear may, perhaps,
be said to give, as it contributes to, an exquisite
tone; but what have animal spirits to do here?
and what, in the matter of tones and sounds,
is the effect of frankness? We shrewdly
suspect that Mr. Hunt, with all his affectation of
Italian literature, knows very little of Ariosto;
it is clear that he knows nothing of Tasso. Of
Shakespeare he tells us, “that his versification
escapes us because he over-informed it with
knowledge and sentiment,” by which it appears
(as well, indeed, as by his own verses), that this
new Stagyrite thinks that good versification runs a
risk of being spoiled by having too much meaning
included in its lines.

To wind up the whole of this admirable, precise, and
useful criticism by a recapitulation as useful and
precise, he says, “all these are about as different
from Pope as the church organ is from the bell in the
steeple, or, to give him a more decorous comparison,
the song of the nightingale from that of the cuckoo.”—­p.
xv.

Now we own that what there is so indecorous
in the first comparison, or so especially decorous
in the second, we cannot discover; neither can we
make out whether Pope is the organ or the bell—­the
nightingale or the cuckoo; we suppose that Mr. Hunt
knows that Pope was called by his contemporaries the
nightingale, but we never heard Milton and
Dryden called cuckoos; or, if the comparison
is to be taken the other way, we apprehend that, though
Chaucer may be to Mr. Hunt’s ears a church
organ, Pope cannot, to any ear, sound like the
church bell.

But all this theory, absurd and ignorant as it is,
is really nothing to the practice of which it effects
to be the defence.